My Struggle With Finding My Audience

byophyax

445 followers

5 years ago

I was inspired to write this following Susan's one year update, here. My cover image is here to show a seagull shouting without an audience.

After more than 4 months, it feels a bit depressing that I don't have much organic traffic, and hence not much of an audience. Also, I'm in the middle of skipping two weeks of working on my website, to help my mom with moving into a residence for seniors, which leads to a lot of time for pondering but very little precious time in terms of DOING.

But instead of focusing on the near-empty glass, I'm going to examine in some detail what is in the glass.

I have 23 pages indexed by Google, spread over 4 websites, out of 39 pages published.

For my first website, AmazingToilets.com, I now have 10 clicks from 630 impressions. I can look at which queries I had the most impressions for. For example, I had no click from 97 impressions of the search for "electronic bidet", or from 40 impressions of "amazing toilet seats". This is not particularly helpful, and since I am currently of the mindset that I gave up on that website 3 months ago. Now I guess that website was good practice ground but it's useless.

I'm attached to it because it's the reason I joined WA: I had a good idea for a high-ticket price product, electronic bidet toilets. But now I'm continuing with WA with only the dim hope that any website with good traffic can be used to make money, so I am focusing on getting traffic, without any idea of how it would make money later on.

For my second website, my travel blog, I had only 1 impression, so that's not encouraging, and anyhow, I gave up on that one too, because there's really no time to work on more than one website.

Finally, for my third website, cpcpworkshops.com, all 4 clicks from 122 impressions came from the same web page, on the 5 Tibetan rites, and for similar keywords, like 5 Tibetan exercises and variations. I'm done with writing on that topic, so what next?

Now, I've got to look into more details about the few other impressions I had, with no clicks.

There were 24 on my article about Dance improvisation. I plan to write at least a couple more articles about dance, so that's not too bad. Next, 9+1 impressions on my 2 acroyoga articles, and 3+1 impressions on my 2 figure skating articles. I'll plan a few more articles on each topic.

For the other articles, very few impressions indeed: 8 on the best lunch bags, 6 for image streaming, 4 on self-coaching, 2 for the therapeutic benefits of painting, 1 on how to live a balanced life, and for Lyne's articles: 3 on breathing methods, and 1 on transforming moods. I've thus mentioned 13 pages for this website. We also have a French translation of this website with only 3 articles so far, 2 clicks and 8 impressions. What's interesting here is the lesser competition: 2 clicks from only 8 impressions!

On the other hand, there is definitely better traffic on YouTube. One of my image streaming videos has 70 views, and 3 likes. But what is my audience? I know they were searching for "image streaming" and found me. But why? What were they really looking for? My hunch is that I didn't really address/answer what they were looking for.

The figure skating also gets a regular amount of viewing, and the acroyoga too, but less: between 4 and 11 views for 6 figure skating videos, and between 0 and 10 on 18 acroyoga videos. My main concern here is that people are looking to watch the best in the world, and I'm never going to be in contention on these topics, so what's the point of me doing it?

There're also 11 views on one travel video, which is encouraging for doing more travel-related stuff, and between 0 and 5 views on the Tibetan rites.

This last bit of data is puzzling: why so few views of the Tibetan rites page, when there were so many (10) clicks, and WA user comments (4)? The only explanation is: people don't bother to watch the videos, which are mostly less than a minute long each, whether they came from WA or from YouTube search! For this, I shall not rant against WA commenters, but instead swallow the blame: I need to increase the quality of my content to make people want to "consume" it.

What can I conclude here? Not much!?

Actually, coming back to my last point: I think the message here is that I need to increase the quality of my content. If you are in a similar situation to mine, i.e. a fair number of posts indexed by Google, but little traffic, then maybe the first thing to consider is whether your content is "the best".

This brings in a lot of anxiety for me. I had hoped I didn't need to be "the best" to succeed on the internet, but we're often told we have to.

Can I be the best at presenting creativity and well-being materials on the internet, the mission of my website? I don't think so. Can I be the best at presenting some piano pieces, figure skating or acroyoga? Much less so. What about the self-coaching or other self-help materials? That's quite saturated. Can I produce better materials, compared to my first versions, on any of these topics: of course yes. But that does not sound good enough. It also cannot happen fast enough, because I can't improve fast enough on these disciplines.

I'm going back into reflection mode about my future with affiliate marketing.